Tag Archives: the louvin brothers

That’s not always the case with superstars. Just because people like someone doesn’t mean someone likes people. But Cash liked people, and he took care to be kind when he could.

As a kid, he’d met one of his musical heroes, Charlie Louvin of The Louvin Brothers, and Louvin’s simple kindness to him inspired him to be nice to people who were nice to him.

And so, in 1973, when a kid named Bill Miller attended a Cash concert in Denver, the Man In Black tossed Miller a harmonica and shook the kid’s hand. That interaction was the first of thousands, and Miller went on to become a Cash preservationist, the caretaker of a breathtaking collection of Cash memorabilia and, in the new century, the owner and operator of The Johnny Cash Museum in downtown Nashville.

This month, Miller moved to Nashville from California, so he and his museum can share an area code.

It was 50 years ago: August 18, 1963. It was 800 miles of tension, cigarettes, two-lane roads and arguments. It was the trip that ended classic country duo the Louvin Brothers, and that likely sealed the tragic fate of Ira Louvin, one of the greatest tenor singers — heck, singers, period — in country music history. And Riddle was along for the ride.

“Watseka, Illinois,” says Riddle, who back then was a 27-year-old entertainer, booked to play a couple of shows with the Louvin Brothers, Ira and Charlie. “The night before, Charlie and Ira and I played an air base in Kansas City, on a Saturday. That Sunday, we went to Watseka. We were a little late getting started: We had to pick Ira up, and he’d been drinking. They argued all the way out, in Charlie’s station wagon.”

It was roughly 450 miles from Kansas City to Watseka, a town in Iroquois County, 90 miles south of Chicago. Ira Louvin’s drinking was nothing new, and neither was Charlie Louvin’s belligerent reaction to it: The drinking made Ira Louvin erratic and temperamental, and his uneven personality was harming the Louvins’ reputation. A group, which had scored major hits in the 1950s including “I Don’t Believe You’ve Met My Baby,” “You’re Running Wild,” “Cash On The Barrelhead” and “My Baby’s Gone,” had generated no Top 10 hits over the past four years.

Click here for a photo gallery of the Louvin Brothers, Ira, left, and Charlie

“Charlie had a good heart, and so did Ira,” says Nashville guitar great Jimmy Capps, who performed with the Louvins from 1958 until 1962, when he was drafted into the Army. “The demon — the bottle — is what split ’em up. Straight, you couldn’t ask for a better guy than Ira. But he was kind of Jekyll and Hyde when he drank. Being brothers, I thought they would never break up. But with the demon, it was worse than a bad marriage.”

The brothers cussed each other up and down on the way to Watseka, then played a show headlined by Ray Price. In Charlie Louvin’s 2012 memoir, “Satan Is Real: The Ballad of the Louvin Brothers,” he writes that Price and Ira Louvin found a bottle to share before the show, exacerbating Charlie Louvin’s agitation. The brothers played one show at 4 p.m. and another at 10.

Louvin was a Country Music Hall of Famer, a genre-shaping force as half of the Louvin Brothers, a notable solo artist and a longtime star of the Grand Ole Opry. He was honest and unusually open, filled with religious certainty and casual profanity.

He was a workhorse who survived an often-brutal childhood, served two wartime military stints and held the duo together even as brother Ira Louvin’s drinking and violent temper threatened to silence a sibling harmony that ranked with the world’s most natural and arresting sounds.

And when that harmony was finally muted — first through a booze-fueled breakup and then permanently when Ira was killed in a car wreck — Charlie forged ahead as a solo act, notching Grammy nominations and finding a next-generation audience of admirers that included Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris and Alison Krauss.

As is my personal tradition, I began hating Christmas this year around Halloween.

Because it’s just too much.

Too wearying. Too much commerce, too much to do, too much to prepare.

And that’s just Halloween. Christmas is even worse.

And so December came, and then it was time to go with the family to find a tree. We took the 18-month-old baby to pick out a tree for the first time. He just stood there and pointed at one tree after another, exclaiming again and again, “A tree!”

Hey, the kid can pick out a tree.

Then it was time to prop the tree on a stand and to feign brief interest while my wife decorated it. (Not my fault: Football was on.) And then came time for the season’s new-century tradition: Picking out the songs for this year’s holiday iTunes playlist. It gives the family some background noise to accompany my annual grumbling.

Paul Yandell, accepting his 'Certified Guitar Player' degree at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in August, 2011 (photo: Donn Jones).

Paul Yandell, a Nashville guitarist who served as Chet Atkins’ right-hand man for 25 years, performed with Jerry Reed and the Louvin Brothers and played on records by Dolly Parton, Perry Como, the Everly Brothers and many more, died Monday morning at his home in Hendersonville. Mr. Yandell, who had been battling cancer, was 76.

Mr. Yandell served stints with many popular performers before teaming with Atkins in 1975. He moved to Nashville from his home state of Kentucky in 1955 and started his musical career playing with the Louvin Brothers until 1959. After serving in the Army, Mr. Yandell spent most of the ’60s performing with Kitty Wells and Johnnie Wright and worked for a year with George Hamilton IV. From 1970-’75, Yandell said he “went to college” by playing with Reed, which segued into his 25-year post as Atkins’ premier sideman.

“Nobody was closer to (Atkins) than Paul,” said Atkins’ daughter, Merle Atkins Russell. “He was literally a life-long friend, his right-hand man and a very dear friend off the stage.”